The Ancient Greek Economy. Markets, Households and City-States

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ThE MARKET fOR SLAVES IN ThE

fIfTh- AND fOURTh-CENTURY AEGEAN

Achaemenid Anatolia as a Case Study

David M. Lewis

τῶν δὲ κτημάτων πρῶτον μὲν καὶ ἀναγκαιότατον τὸ βέλτιστον καὶ οἰκονομικώτατον·

τοῦτο δὲ ἦν ἄνθρωπος. διὸ δεῖ πρῶτον δούλους παρασκευάζεσθαι σπουδαίους.

Of property, the first and most necessary sort is that which is also the best and most useful

for household management: the human being. Our first step therefore must be to pro-

cure industrious slaves.

[Arist.] Oec. 1.5.1

The observation made by the anonymous fourth century author of the

Oeconomica on the importance of procuring industrious slaves, although stated

in relation to the domestic micro-economy, is equally applicable at a more

general level to the multitude of slave systems that existed in the Classical

Aegean. In Attica, the system we know best, the existence of a constant, reli-

able supply of slaves was a sine qua non: its economy made considerable use of

slave labor in a wide variety of sectors, from agriculture and manufacture to

mining, prostitution and a range of services. The purpose of this chapter is to

explore how far involvement with markets and commerce in sourcing slaves

enabled this slave economy^1 to function, and to gauge the degree to which for-

eign supply enabled the Athenians to create a slave system that was significantly

different at a structural level from those systems that relied on reproduction

alone to perpetuate themselves numerically, such as the largely agrarian slave

economies of Sparta and Crete. Rather than aim at a general picture, this chap-

ter provides a case study. It aims to isolate one single branch of the slave trade

and subject it to close scrutiny, by tracing the flow of slaves from Achaemenid